It depends! There are a few different kinds of forwards that you can receive, each with different characteristics.

The following sections discuss 1-click subscribers—people who subscribe to your newsletter by hitting the "subscribe in 1 click" button. The charts and metrics don't include people who sign up by going to your landing page because it's more difficult for us to measure that. So the true number of subscribers you receive will usually be higher than what we report.

Organic forwards are the most common. Every newsletter gets at least a couple hundred organic forwards soon after being submitted. After that, it just depends on reader preferences—we'll forward your newsletter to someone whenever we think they'll enjoy it more than any other newsletter we might send them.

An important measure of this is your conversion rate, the percentage of forward recipients who sign up to your newsletter using the "subscribe in 1 click" button. The higher your conversion rate is, the more organic forwards you are likely to receive. This chart shows how many 1-click subscribers newsletters have received based on their conversion rate.

There's one more important factor: in order to prevent a few popular newsletters from hogging all the forwards, we use some simple techniques to boost newsletters with fewer forwards. We try to spread organic forwards somewhat evenly while still sending people newsletters that they're likely to enjoy.

This means that the more organic forwards you receive, the more difficult it will become to get more. It's normal for the number of forwards you get per week to decrease over time.

If you enable paid forwards, we'll forward your newsletter more often and charge you based on how many additional 1-click subscribers you receive. We use an automated bidding system similar to other ad marketplaces.

For example, if Bob has a 4% chance of subscribing to your newsletter and you set your maximum bid price to $3.50, then the max expected value for your newsletter is 4% * $3.50 = $0.14. If another newsletter has a max bid price of $4.00 and a 2% chance of being subscribed to by Bob, then the max expected value is $0.08. Your newsletter wins the auction, so we forward it to Bob. If Bob subscribes, then you pay the minimum amount you could have bid while still winning the auction. In this example, you'd pay $2.00, because 4% * $2.00 = $0.08.

That's a long way of saying that in general, the higher your conversion rate is, the more cheaply you can get subscribers via paid forwards. To give you an idea of how much you'll need to bid to win auctions, this chart shows the costs of paid forwards that resulted in a 1-click subscribe.

Finally, cross-promotion forwards are given in proportion to how many people sign up to The Sample using your unique referral link. We'll keep giving you more forwards until either (1) the number of additional 1-click subscribers you've received is at least as much as the number of referrals you've sent us, or (2) you've received at least 100 additional forwards for each referral. If you refer 5 people, you'll receive at most 500 cross-promotion forwards.

So as long as your conversion rate is at least 1%, we should be able to match you. However, if you send us a lot of referrals, we might end up sending your newsletter to our entire subscriber base. If that's not enough to match you, then we'll keep giving you more forwards as we gain new subscribers.